Past, Present, and Future of the Restaurant Industry: A focus on the factors affecting restaurant sales and the consumer's demand for eating out

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In the first part of this paper, I discussed my summer internship experience at the
L. Lee Stryker Center, including everyday duties, projects, relevance to college course
work, and influence on future career choices. On several occasions throughout my
internship, I listened to clients seeking assistance from the Stryker Center in regards to
starting a new business. Investigating the profitability of not only individual companies
but also entire industries greatly appealed to me. Since I had previously completed a
report on the restaurant industry in my Industrial Organization course at Kalamazoo
College, I had already developed some background information and an initial interest.
The restaurant industry with its many statistics can be mathematically analyzed to more
closely investigate issues such as trends in sales, overall profitability, changes in
consumer demand, and price levels.
While analyzing the restaurant industry, I examined two main issues. To evaluate
the first question, changes in restaurant sales over the past twenty years, I collected a
wide variety of data between the years of 1980 and 2000 looking for specific trends. The
variables I investigated were restaurant sales, median household income, federal
minimum wage, unemployment rate, and the U.S. population. Restaurant sales, median
household income, and the federal minimum wage were all inflation adjusted. In
addition to evaluating changes in restaurant sales, I also compared current consumer
demand for food away from home to past consumer demand. To examine consumer
demand, I focused on individual leisure time. To assess individual leisure time, I
examined changes in workforce participation rates, particularly the increase in female
workers, and changes in the number of hours worked per week. To fully answer these
questions, I performed correlations and regressions to form my conclusions.